Geoff Sowrey, in a recent post over at Experience Matters, the Critical Mass blog, says, “Blog or die“. In the post, which echoes so much of the Planting Seeds analogy, Geoff writes:

“The internet is a noisy place. It’s filled with every type of company and personality, all trying to make themselves heard all at the same time. (Marshall McLuhan would have exploded from joy if he’d lived to see today’s internet). Like standing in the middle of a loud party, it’s hard to be heard. That’s why presence is so important ‚Äî people will pay attention to those they perceive as important. You need to be staking claims in a variety of places, and investing time and effort in key areas to ensure the quality and intensity of your signal can rise to the top.”

The key to the above paragraph, in my opinion? Investing the time and effort. If you’re going to be on a network and not putting in the time, not adding value to people who may be following you, then there’s just no point in being there. And the other key, though unmentioned here? Well, it’s not just that people will pay attention to those they perceive as important. They’ll also pay attention to people that add something important to their lives. And that can be accomplished in so many different ways. By answering questions. Solving problems. Pointing to valuable resources. Making introductions. The list goes on.

Later on in his post, Geoff points out what he believes to be the major issue with spreading your voice around:

“Hopefully, you’ve already noticed the problem here. Microchannels ‚Äî as cool and enticing as they are ‚Äî are tricky to coordinate into a cohesive message. It’s sort of like trying to pull together lines from a dozen different books so you can read “Dick and Jane.” It also requires work for the reader (e.g. reading multiple Twitters or looking through Flickr pictures). And that (drum roll, please) makes it really hard to easily provide your point of view.”

He goes on to advocate blogs as the solution to this problem. The one place where you can take people in and point them around.

Now, that’s all true. But I’d argue that this is not the only way to do so. In fact, in some ways, FriendFeed (join me on Friendfeed) may be a much more effective way to bring your wider presence together onto one page. And, to make it even more robust, visitors to your FriendFeed page can also comment on individual posts, so the entire conversation can be held over there.

Blogs are certainly powerful, and that’s true for a whole host of reasons. But, if you’re establishing a wider presence and looking to bring it all together, I’d say Friendfeed is a better option for keeping your multiple conversations together on one page.

Any thoughts on Friendfeed vs. a blog for keeping track of your microchannels?

Tags: PlantingSeeds, Planting Seeds Online, PlantingSeeds.ca, Mark Goren, Geoff Sowrey, Critical Mass, Experience Matters, Blogging, Blog, Web Presence, Micro-channels, FriendFeed, Twitter, Flickr